


it's all over

by empressoffire



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Mental Breakdown, i know little about fallout lore and you can tell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-10
Updated: 2017-01-10
Packaged: 2018-09-16 17:07:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9281552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/empressoffire/pseuds/empressoffire
Summary: Fem sole handles all the violence of the new world badly. Nick helps, a bit.





	

The light is streaming softly through the curtains, and she smiles. It’s oddly cold, and when she reaches for blankets that aren’t there, she just figures that she’s kicked them off, again. When she reaches for Nate and can’t find him, that’s slightly more worrying, but maybe he’s just tending to Shaun. That’s it, has to be, and she should get up and help, because hey, it’s her kid too. Then she opens her eyes, and her heart stops. The walls are steel, there’s no blankets to be found, she doesn’t even have a bed, she’s just laying on a dirty mattress on the ground.

Her cheek clings to the dirty cloth when she tries to lift her head, and rolling onto her back provides the unpleasant sensation of her clothes and skin sticking to the mattress. Because that’s what happens when you just collapse on the first thing that looks slightly more comfortable than the ground without bothering to wash all the blood and gore off yourself because you’ve been walking and fighting and killing all day and it’s fucking exhausting damn it; the blood dries and you stick to things. 

This is her life now. Fighting and violence and yesterday she shot a goddamn dog (it was trying to eat her face, but goddamn that doesn’t make her feel less shitty). She remembers, years ago, sitting at the kitchen table, helping her father shine his medals for some parade the next day. There were many, so many. Major Amos West was a decorated soldier, good at battle, better at killing. She was twenty-three then, already dating Nate, working on her law degree and going to anti-war protests on the weekends. She remembers telling her father about that, expecting him to be upset, to say something about the hypocrisy of her, living stereotype with a soldier boyfriend and father complaining about the army. Instead, he’d put the medal and polish down on the table, looking at her seriously. “I’m glad you’re doing that.” He’d said. “My mothers both served and their parents before them. This whole family’s been soldiers for far too long. We’re drenched in violence. But not you. I’m so proud of you.” He’d looked down, shaking his head. “I wonder what that says about me, that I’m so proud that my daughter doesn’t have blood on her hands.” 

Three days ago, she beat a woman to death with a baseball bat. Her father is long dead, (“I’ll be back before your wedding,” he’d promised, shipping out on a six-month tour of duty. She’d walked herself down the aisle, age 25), the world she knew is dead and gone, and it’s cutthroat here. Death is common as breathing, with raiders and giant mutant bears and radioactive zombies and those fucking blood sucking bugs the size of a german shepherd. She’s seen people here killed over a bottle of cola, fuck, her first memory of this new post-apocalyptic wasteland is Nate being murdered and his killers running off with her goddamn son (when she closes her eyes, she’s there all over again, seeing the way Nate fell back, his eyes dimming, Shaun screaming as they took him away, the icy cold that gripped her limbs and held her frozen in place. They killed her husband, and she couldn’t even scream.) It doesn’t make it better. 

Maybe it’s that that sends her sprinting from her bed, haphazardly grabbing the first container (a dingy old milk container, 2L) she sees and running to the water pump. She fills it, then takes off again, trying to find somewhere quiet. Not back in her little metal shack, because the people of this settlement know she lives there and they’re depending on her for everything and she needs to be alone, just fucking alone.  
She winds up diving into one of the abandoned houses that was too far gone to even consider repairs. It’s a little more than a skeleton, but it’s isolated and no one will think to look for her here. She kneels in the 200 year old shower, and pours the ice cold water over her head, scrubbing furiously with her bare hands. 

It’s not enough water, and the plumbing here doesn’t work and it’s not enough, it’s not enough, nothing will ever be enough, she could wash herself with the whole fucking ocean and it wouldn’t be enough. She’s sobbing, water soaked through a thin flannel shirt she’d pulled off a man she shot in the head, trying to get the blood off. Her fingers catch a healing scab, and rip it open, blood pouring down her face. Facial wounds always bleed like a bitch. A polite cough catches her off guard. 

“Is this a morning ritual, or are you just having some sort of breakdown?” Nick asks, leaning against the doorframe. He looks calm, though that might just be his face, cast in shadow under his hat. She freezes. “Look, kid, if you’re having a hard time, and I don’t blame ya if you are, maybe there are healthier ways to deal with it?” She just stares, mumbling something about the blood. Nick sighs. “I’ll be right back. Don’t move kid.”

He returns ten minutes later with a bucket full of water and some soap, then drapes his dusty trench coat over the sink. He settles on his knees on the cold floor beside the shower with a grunt, and begins washing her hair. She’s quiet the whole time, so he begins to tell her stories, things he’s done and seen. They’re a lot less violent than the stories she normally hears him tell around the campfire. He moves on to her face and her hands when her hair’s clean. “I’m not touching anything that’s covered,” he warns her, pausing his a story about a noodle thief and a runaway cat. It’s like she’s three again, her father washing her hair in the bath, the same look of ‘am I doing this right? I never expected this’ on both their faces.  
When he’s done, Nick sits back on his heels. “Better? I thought so.” He gets up, muttering about his aching joints and how the floor couldn’t be good for them. “Come on, you, stand up.” The trenchcoat is wrapped around her shoulders and she is taken back to her hut. “Put some dry clothes on and get some sleep, do ya hear me?” Nick orders. She nods, and goes back inside. She lays down and falls asleep almost instantly. The empty blackness (like death itself) is a relief.

**Author's Note:**

> so my new year's resolution was to do more shit that scares me, and clearly the next step was requesting an ao3 invitation at 3am and posting a very old (but beta'd) work the moment i got my account. so here it is and here i am.


End file.
